Religion: The Cottonpatch Crusade

Outside the bunkhouse, the Rev. Rudy Hernandez unlimbered his marimba and began to waft La Paloma into the evening air. One by one the men strolled out to listen, and Hernandez’ assistant got ready the tracts. The Cottonpatch Crusade was under way in Pecos, Texas.

Before World War II, Pecos was nothing but a dusty crossroads cattle town. Then some oil wells came in, and irrigation experiments on the bone-dry soil paid off so well that Pecos became a thriving cotton center (pop. 12,450). To pick the crop each year, Pecos depends mainly on the braceros—legally imported Mexican laborers who come north to work the season for free transportation, shelter and an average of $35 a week. This year the Baptist General Convention of Texas decided to do something about their souls as well as their bodies. With a team of 13 Latin American Baptists, marimba-playing Preacher Hernandez checked into Pecos’ Lone Star Motel for a week-long Cottonpatch Crusade.

Hernandez, who once organized his own dance band, proved expert at setting up the braceros with music before following with Spanish-language tracts and exhortations emphasizing clean lives and the obligation to return to wives and children with full pockets. On Saturday night, when the sombreroed braceros jammed the streets and shops, Baptist Hernandez sent his preaching teams fanning out through town. Stationing himself in front of the Safeway store, he soon had his Mexican listeners pressing forward to make “decisions for Christ”—though some were just being amiable to the young man in fine clothes who played the wonderful, sad music. None of the Mexicans were baptized during the crusade; their names and addresses were merely taken with the intention of sending them on to the nearest Baptist mission in Mexico. Although most of them were theoretically Roman Catholics, at least 90% answered no to the question: “Have you heard the Gospel [el Evangelio] before?”

Before long, the local Catholics were stung to action. Wearing a light sport shirt and black trousers and carrying a heavy cane, Father James Milano of Pecos’ Santa Rosa Catholic Church appeared, shouting, “Catholics—don’t listen to these men. Go away from them!” But the braceros paid little attention. “This so-called crusade is an insult to the Catholic Church,” he said later. “These Baptists consider the men pagans and even tell them they are. It’s not so. It’s an affront to come in and confuse these simple, uneducated people like that.”

This week, as Preacher Hernandez and his Baptist crusaders moved north to Lubbock, where the cotton picking was just beginning, they claimed the results for their week’s work: 1,062 conversions.